I am an evil giraffe. Who no longer blogs about politics.

Turns out that Ulysses S Grant is not actually buried in Grant’s Tomb. He’s apparently not buried at all, in fact. And, yes, we’re talking about something that’s a bit creepier than mere grave-robbing.

It’s like this: old H.P. Lovecraft was onto something with regard to Essential Saltes — or, rather, the books of his grandfather’s that he mined for ideas were onto something. Not the bits about cosmic horror, hopefully; but the techs keep babbling something about DNA echoes and the holographic residue thrown off by souls and the short version is, if you mix enough of a corpse with enough carbon, water, sodium chloride, and [CLASSIFIED] you can get a self-aware humanoid product of science that more or less has the skill set and memories of the original donor.

The thing is, you need a lot of the original corpse, and there’s an upper limit of about 200 years or so before things denature too strongly. So… nobody who has died before the War of 1812, or thereabouts. On the bright side, there are any number of historical figures who can still be brought back to existence, and DARPA is — was — currently funding one particular operation that had a handy list. Grant was one of the half-dozen proof-of-concepts that they dug up, brought up, and… promptly lost.

Or perhaps ‘let slip through their fingers.’ The aforementioned proof-of-concepts may or may not have gently overpowered the guards, busted out of their containment facility, stole a bus, and are now wandering the back roads of America. Why? Apparently they felt that ‘they could do more good out there.’ At least, that’s what the note said. So, best to go get them back, right? Carefully, though. Oh, so very, very carefully.

…Ah. Yes. The half dozen. Well, there’s Grant. And, ah, Teddy Roosevelt. Andrew Jackson, yes, we know, we’ve had words on this topic with the project leads. Joe Louis. Julia Child. And those lunatics even managed to get the King himself. That one grates: there’s been protections on Presley’s grave for decades, to prevent just this sort of catastrophe. Anyway: do you now understand why the concern? That’s not a group of refugees; that’s a carnival of chaos just waiting to happen…

I could see this leading to memory-exploring tech, similar to what the Animus accomplishes in the Assassin’s Creed series. Let’s say you don’t have enough to create an entire construct, but you still have enough material to extract a few memories. Some of those memories could have enormous historical significance. The memory extraction trade could be a lucrative one.